President Donald Trump may not have won the internationally renowned award he has long sought this year, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. leader will be taking his eye off the Nobel Peace Prize.
And that may be for good reason. While Trump has broken with the tradition of past recipients in fervently campaigning for the honor, his day may finally yet come as the administration’s 20-point peace plan gains elusive momentum in ending the longest and deadliest war of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Many questions still surround the acceptance, implementation and future impact of the U.S. proposal, but recent breakthroughs are earning Trump praise from friends and foes alike. Even former President Barack Obama, who accepted the prize in 2009 while acknowledging the irony that he was then presiding over two wars, wrote in an X post Thursday that “we should all be encouraged and relieved that an end to the conflict is within sight.”
But as Donald Trump Jr., pointed out, there was something the former leader omitted. “I’ll finish it for you. ‘Thank you, Donald Trump,'” the president’s son wrote in response.
Whether Trump will earn that recognition from the Nobel Committee in a year’s time remains to be seen. Yet a number of former officials involved in past Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, including the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Oslo Accords that ultimately unraveled in the following years, feel Trump is closer than ever to securing the award.
Some say he’s already earned his due.
“Notwithstanding my skepticism that the second phase of Trump’s 20-Point Plan ever comes to fruition, I believe that Trump has won his place among Nobel laureates,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as special envoy for former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, one of two Israeli leaders who won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Oslo Accords.
“From the prize committee perspective, having ended a horrific war and saving countless Palestinian lives, is more than some past recipients have accomplished,” Novik, now a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, told Newsweek. “From a parochial Israeli perspective, he has already won our heartfelt gratitude for saving our hostages and lives of our troops.”
‘Like A Particle Accelerator’
Beyond the lingering uncertainty around the ongoing peace process between Israel and Hamas, those who scoff at the idea of Trump as Nobel laureate often point to the many controversies surrounding other areas of his presidency. Trump’s crackdowns on crime and immigration, along with his claims that his 2020 election loss was “rigged,” have proven divisive at a time of growing political polarization and violence in the U.S., not to mention the many legal challenges that seemingly evaporated upon his 2024 electoral comeback.
But controversy is nothing new for the Nobel institution, whose founder, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, was best known in his time as the inventor of dynamite, earning him the nickname “the merchant of death” in some circles.
And of the four U.S. presidents to win the prize, perhaps only former President Jimmy Carter, a lifelong peace activist, has escaped the most serious scrutiny.
President Theodore Roosevelt, credited with mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, also pursued militaristic expansion in Latin America and the Philippines. President Woodrow Wilson, acclaimed for founding the post-World War I League of Nations, ultimately never joined the United Nations predecessor. Obama’s prize was perhaps most opaque of all, earned less than nine months into his first term for strengthening international diplomacy prior to any major foreign policy results and while continuing his predecessor’s “War on Terror.”
Trump’s legacy-in-the-making shares some criticisms in common with all three men, while also proving uniquely contentious. And yet his maverick approach to the presidency has demonstrated he can also be a force for peace to be reckoned with.
“A week ago, his accomplishment was considered impossible,” Novik said. “Yet, with tremendous resolve and at a lightning speed, he forced an odd coalition of countries with conflicting interests to join hands in pressing Hamas to go along, while taking it upon himself to force Netanyahu to accept a deal harder to swallow than ones he previously rejected.”
“Like a powerful particle accelerator,” he added. “Trump forced all involved—parties and mediators alike—to move in hypersonic speed, and got it done.”
Novik was also adamant that the ultimate fate of Trump’s initiative should not dictate his worthiness for the Nobel Peace Prize, whose past winners have track records that are far from flawless.
“I do not accept that the uncertainty about phase two of his plan—the so-called Gaza Day After management; let alone phase three which presumes to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—suggests a wait-and-see attitude before awarding the prize,” Novik said. “I recall past recipients having included some, like those awarded the prize for the Oslo Agreements, whose recognition was certainly justified even though their achievement proved short-lived.”
‘The World’s Greatest Ideology Is Success’
The tragic legacy of the Oslo Accords looms large on Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize prospects. Once a historic beacon of hope for the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1990s peace process has since been nearly unanimously deemed a failure, having been followed by a sharp uptick in violence and even the assassination of one of its architects, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who shared Peres’ Nobel Peace Prize with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Disputes and unaddressed grievances in the ensuing years paved the way for the rise of Hamas, its takeover of Gaza, several battles with Israel and the all-out assault on October 7, 2023, that sparked the historic confrontation Trump’s plan hopes to finally end two years later.
But the death of the Oslo Accords, which were mediated with the help of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, did not occur overnight. Talks persisted for years among the three parties, including Netanyahu during his first term as premier, and since then there has yet to be a more comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who played a key part in shaping the U.S. role at the Oslo Accords, argued that Trump’s contribution to the decades-long conflict would likely be evaluated on the basis of its impact and endurance, both of which were still pending.
“The world’s greatest ideology is success,” Miller, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Newsweek. “It’s not communism, it’s not nationalism, it’s not even capitalism, nor is it democracy. It’s success. That’s what is an arbiter, success and, as an Olympic diving judge would tell you, the degree of difficulty of the dive. How hard was it? And what was actually accomplished? Is it enduring?”
“Oslo collapsed, but it took Rabin’s murder,” he added. “And we were still trying to save that process from 1996-1999, working with Benjamin Netanyahu, who, I might add, initialed two agreements with Yasser Arafat.”
As such, Miller argued that the jury was still out on whether the Nobel Committee would be swayed by the current state of Trump’s push for peace. Should it succeed, however, he was confident the president would be deserving.
“Do I think the Nobel Committee would give Donald Trump a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Gaza—literally ending the war in Gaza? That is to say, dealing with the unresolved elements of demilitarization, governance, stabilization, in terms of international security force, reconstruction and governance, if, in fact, he could accomplish all of that and Gaza first was not Gaza only, a bridge was built to the possibility of a better pathway for Israelis and Palestinians and could lead to a regional peace?” Miller said.
“Yeah, you better believe it.”
‘It Just May Happen’
Dennis Ross, a veteran U.S. diplomat who served successive administrations from Carter to Clinton and as a key Middle East envoy during the Oslo Accords, had similar questions regarding the future of the Trump initiative on Gaza.
“It is not just about the Day After governance, but Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is tied to disarmament of Hamas,” Ross, today a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Newsweek.
“Who is going to do it? What is the pace? What is the proof it has happened? What if Hamas tries to reassert itself in Gaza, what does Israel do? There are no simple answers to these questions and answering them really would create a new track that could lead somewhere down the road to a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.”
One point on which Ross, Miller and Novik all align is the significance of Trump’s willingness to apply pressure on Netanyahu, a feat previously witnessed when the incoming administration helped its predecessor get a temporary ceasefire locked in just ahead of Inauguration Day in January.
Sources recently told Newsweek that efforts by Trump’s team, particularly his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and special envoy Steve Witkoff, to navigate the precarious landscape of opposing Israeli and Arab asks proved crucial to getting the deal across the finish line.
“President Trump has changed the context with his applying leverage on PM Netanyahu and the key Arab states—states that want to build his stake in them,” Ross said.
Beyond addressing the situation in Gaza, he argued a successful phase two for Trump would mean living up to his deal’s 19th point of achieving a reformation of the Palestinian National Authority (PA), the West Bank-based administrative body established by the Oslo Accords and severed from Gaza since Hamas’ takeover amid a schism with the PA’s leading Fatah party.
Led by President Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Arafat upon his death two decades ago, the PA’s legitimacy has been beset by accusations of corruption, lack of elections and growing violence by Israeli settlers and armed Palestinian factions.
“No doubt a long road of reform of the PA has been resisted for a long time, but if the Arab states decide it must happen, we will be in a very different place,” Ross said. “They have never assumed responsibility for moving the Palestinians—and if Trump makes clear that is what he requires, it just may happen.”
‘It Does in Itself Make Peace’
Trump’s assertive, often transactional diplomatic style has made headway in reshaping the Middle East in the past. In a major undertaking that has thus far survived the brutality of the two-year war in Gaza and accompanying regional upheaval, the first Trump administration oversaw the 2020 Abraham Accords through which four Arab nations—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco—agreed to normalize diplomatic ties with Israel.
It was the first set of Arab-Israeli normalization agreements—barring Mauritania’s decade-long recognition rescinded after the 2009 Gaza war—since the Oslo-era Wadi Araba peace treaty struck between Israel and Jordan in 1994. Prior to that, only one other Arab country, Egypt, had made peace with Israel in a 1979 deal that followed the Carter-led Camp David Accords, for which both then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize.
For Trump, the Nobel Committee’s snub of the Abraham Accords marked a setback he is fighting to reverse to this day. The president’s personal ambitions aside, however, the stakes this time around are higher than ever.
“Ending the war is extremely significant,” Ghaith al-Omari, former adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during post-Oslo Accords talks, told Newsweek. “This has been by far the bloodiest war between Israel and the Palestinians. And the trajectory in recent weeks has been very concerning as Israel was readying to launch an operation against Gaza City.”
“Ending this bloodshed, particularly after many failed past attempts is a major achievement,” he added. “But beyond that, the war has been extremely disruptive on the regional level. Ending the war can unlock regional processes that can bring a measure of regional stability.”
He, too, pointed out that there are “many unanswered questions regarding the subsequent phases” of the agreement, and its success “is far from guaranteed.”
At the same time, Omari argued that the scope alone of the 20-point peace plan sets it apart from previous peace deals, including Trump’s own Abraham Accords for one simple reason: it actually ends a war.
“Previous peace plans—Camp David 1978, Oslo and Wadi Araba—and the Abraham Accords were about making peace and creating structures in support of this goal,” Omari said. “They have changed the trajectory of the region in ways that are still enduring. The 20-plan by contrast is about ending a war.”
“References to lasting peace are vague. This does not make it less worthy—as mentioned, ending the bloodiest Arab-Israeli war is highly significant,” he added. “But unlike previous initiatives—including the Abraham Accords for which President Trump deserves credit—it does in itself make peace.”
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